Adam Nobody: Witness describes chaotic scene of alleged G20 assault

Smart, polite and despite dogged attempts to paint him to the contrary without an axe to grind, Mr. Bridge was one of the amateur videographers whose footage of the G20 protests in Toronto three years ago, which he posted on YouTube, brought him a measure of attention.

He was the first witness to testify Wednesday at the trial of Toronto Police Constable Babak Andalib-Goortani, who is charged with assaulting Adam Nobody.

If Mr. Nobody became what one newspaper called at the time “the battered face” of the G20 protests, so Mr. Bridge may be the cheerful face of good citizenship, of all those who were swept up in that huge event and kept their wits about them.

The 33-year-old officer is pleading not guilty to assault with a weapon — his nightstick — during a police takedown of Mr. Nobody at Queen’s Park on Saturday, June 26.

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Mr. Nobody was arrested and charged with obstructing one officer and assaulting another, neither of them Const. Andalib-Goortani. These charges were formally dropped on Oct. 1, 2010.

Two months later, after considerable controversy about whether Mr. Bridge’s video had been doctored — it had not been, and Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair himself later apologized for having suggested otherwise — Const. Andalib-Goortani was charged.

According to an agreed statement of facts introduced as an exhibit earlier this week, the officer is not alleged to have inflicted any of the facial injuries Mr. Nobody suffered — he had a broken nose and shattered cheekbone — and the legality of the arrest itself is not in dispute.

(However, whatever lawful grounds the police had to arrest Mr. Nobody, it had nothing to do with the contents of a red water bottle he was carrying. This wasn’t at all clear in the agreed statement of facts, and in a story earlier this week I leapt to the wrong conclusion.)

In any case, as Mr. Bridge told Ontario Court Judge Louise Botham, what there was in his video was a four-second gap.

The video actually consisted of two clips, one six seconds long, the other 19 seconds; he’d put the two together when he posted the footage so that people could “have it play as one thing.”

The 39-year-old web designer, a native Newfoundlander, arrived at Queen’s Park that day around suppertime, his trusty Canon point-and-shoot in hand.

The police were forming a line on College Street as he got there.

At some point not much later, police on horses came up through the crowd in front of the Legislature, “two or three times,” Mr. Bridge said. He said he saw “a man run down by a horse,” and on the line, officers began rapping their riot shields, and advancing.

“People were getting scared,” he told prosecutor Philip Perlmutter.

What prompted him to start the camera, Mr. Bridge said, was “a woman in a wheelchair, being passed by the horses.”

She was leaving the area, Mr. Bridge said, but was slower, “not having the ability to get out of the way as quickly as everyone else … it was disconcerting.”

‘I think he was just trying to get out of there. He did a double-time run to get out of the way’

When he saw officers break from the line and start chasing a man, whom Mr. Bridge now knows was Mr. Nobody, he started filming.

“I think he was just trying to get out of there,” Mr. Bridge said. “He did a double-time run to get out of the way.”

He saw an officer bring him to the ground with a hand on Mr. Nobody’s shoulder, he said, then Mr. Nobody was surrounded by officers. (There appear to have been five actively involved in the arrest.)

“I didn’t see any resistance,” he said. “I don’t think he [Mr. Nobody] was a big enough guy to get them off him he wanted to … He was blocked, just covered in police officers.”

“Was he able to move?” Mr. Perlmutter asked.

“No sir,” said Mr. Bridge.

He was later interviewed by the province’s Special Investigations Unit, which probes all incidents where citizens are killed or seriously hurt in confrontations with police, was contacted by Mr. Nobody, who until then was a stranger to him, and ultimately even met Mr. Nobody’s lawyers, Julian Falconer and Sunil Mathai, who represent the 30-year-old stagehand in a civil suit against the police.

After a press conference at Mr. Falconer’s office, in fact, the four — Messrs. Nobody, Falconer, Mathai and Bridge – went to a Raptors’ game on Mr. Falconer’s dime.

And Mr. Bridge and Mr. Nobody have since formed an amiable if casual relationship; they run into one another at concerts, where Mr. Nobody works setting up the stage, and are Facebook friends. The two were also featured in a French documentary about the SIU, and exchanged a hug on camera.

All this was the focus of Mr. Bridge’s aggressive cross-examination by Harry Black, Const. Andalib-Goortani’s fierce lawyer.

While it is surely unusual that an alleged victim and a witness should become friendly, and while Mr. Black’s questions were utterly legitimate, Mr. Bridge’s steadfast character defeated the thrust.

“You have a social relationship, a friendly relationship [with Mr. Nobody],” Mr. Black said at one point. “Do you think you’re completely neutral?”

“I wouldn’t say anybody could be completely neutral about any subject,” Mr. Bridge replied in his even way.

“He seemed to think he would have been in prison” had it not been for his video, Mr. Bridge said. “I didn’t see anything that would have warranted him being in prison.”

Mr. Black could neither rile nor rattle Mr. Bridge. Only once did he get the least bit cheeky, this when Mr. Black, trying to ascertain what time Mr. Bridge had arrived at Queen’s Park, barked, “What do you mean by ‘suppertime’?”

“The meal after lunch,” Mr. Bridge replied mildly.

Mr. Bridge’s two video clips, as well as two others from two other videographers, form the main exhibits at the officer’s trial.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.